The Duran Podcast
Ukraine, front line slow motion collapse
At Alexandria, let's talk about the military situation in Ukraine, and it does look like we are seeing a slow motion collapse on the front line for the Ukraine military. In some directions, maybe not so slow in the progress, directions, things seem to be speeding up. But what's your assessment of the situation on the front lines? I would agree. I think it's actually speeding up. There are two, three places where the fighting is now incredibly intense. One is the, you know, Ocherde, you know, of Devka, Progras area, where clearly the Russians are moving, and they're moving fast now. I mean, they're advancing, you know, many kilometers a day, and fortified positions are falling one after the other, and the Ukrainians there are not fighting. Now, there was a very weird story that was circulating over the last couple of days, which has been picked up by the media, even in the West, and it actually illustrates quite well what is happening. So there's this village, which is Progras, Progras is on a hill. It's in this area of the Ocherde, in North Devka sector. It's one of the outlying villages that formed the defense lines for Progras. It had been apparently fortified under former President Poroshenko, and it's on a hill. So all of the indications were that it was a place where the Ukrainians would stand and fight and try to hold the Russians back, who had been advancing rapidly right through this area. And there's reports also that if the Russians capture Progras, city of about 50,000, big army in Donbas, and apparently, if you look at the front lines, it's the hinge points. So, you know, it's the place where the Ukrainians have to go through if they're going to keep the two parts of the front. The front lines, the front in Zaporogia and Herzon region, you know, in the west and the south and the part in the north in the rest of Donbas, you can keep them together. If they lose Pakrask, they run a real risk of having these two big area regions split from each other that the Russians will be able to break through. And divide, in effect, the entire front line in both places. So, Pakrask is important, and by definition, Progras was important as well, and it was on a hill. It'd been fortified. There was every reason to think, therefore, that the Ukrainians would make a stand there. They didn't. The Russians just steamrolled up, and the village fell basically without a blow. And we got the reports that started to circulate over the next couple of days that two battalions of Ukrainian troops in that area had been surrounded, and they've been told to stand and fight, but they refused to do so, and they retreated, and they broke through their encirclement, and this has been talked about, and it's been built up as, you know, a major story and the achievement of the Ukrainians in breaking out of the trap. I don't know that there was a trap in this area at all. I'm not sure that there was any sort of trap. The Russians never claimed that they'd encircled or trapped two Ukrainian battalions in this area. What it looks like to me is as if the Ukrainian troops could have been tasked with the job of defending progress, simply fled, and in order to, you know, make that, to spin that, to make it look better than it was, this, you know, story of the troops being surrounded and, you know, breaking through the encirclement was, you know, constructed in its place, because the fact is that the troops fled, apparently disobeying orders, and this key village fell. Now that tells us that morale in this area, on the part of the Ukrainian army, is very bad. The Russians are advancing irresistibly, and the Ukrainians don't seem to be able to organise a coherent defence to hold them back. But the same story is repeating itself at other places. So Torek is a big mining and industrial town to the north of Donette City. It's quite close to another big town, a big city called Gorlofka, which is part of, you know, kind of the Donette's conurbation. The Ukrainians have not heavily fortified it, it was supposed to be one of the most heavily fortified positions in the entire front lines, been fortifying it since 2014. The Russians began to attack this area, Torek back in June, and Ukrainian defences have simply collapsed, again, fortified positions. But the Russians are just cutting through, like in a nice blue butter, places which one would have expected, it would take months of heavy gruelling fighting for the Russians to capture. They're able to capture in days, and the speed of the advance there is astonishing. And going further north still, other important town, which is Chassafyar, Chassafyar is the gateway to Kramatorsk, which is one of the major cities that the Ukrainians still control. Budanov, the head of Ukrainian intelligence, said that all the best men in the Ukrainian army are in either heart of region, fighting the Russians along the border, or are concentrated in Chassafyar, and the fighting in Chassafyar has been very intense and very difficult. But even there, the Russians now apparently have broken through. We got reports some days ago that the Russians, in fact, not just reports, filmed some days ago that showed Russian troops in the centre of the town. Yesterday, we got many more reports confirming not only the presence of Russian troops in the centre of the town, but showing that they control a large area of the central and eastern parts of the town. And again, one sense is that resistance there is starting to crumble, not as quickly as in the place that we spoke about, Pakrosk, Pragnesk, nor as quickly as in Torezk. But still, we're starting to see the defences break down. So, yes, it's a slow-motion collapse still, but it is a slow-motion collapse that she's getting faster. It's a little bit like, you know, the avalanche starts with a small number of pebbles, then the pebbles turn into bigger stones, then the odd boulder falls, and then the whole eventually, the whole cliff collapses. Yeah, the F-16 narrative, the Wonder Weapon narrative is also crumbling. I don't know if you saw the Washington Post article, which we don't expect any game-changing effects from the F-16. So, I mean, they've come to the end of the road as far as the Wonder Weapons goes as well, because the F-16's, that's it. I mean, it's a bleak military situation and outlook. I mean, there is no path to victory, or at least I can't see one. I don't know. I mean, I cannot see one at all. The other thing is, absolutely, the F-16's, we were told about how, you know, they were going to be the game-changer. It turns out they only have six pilots to fly them, six against the, you know, Russian Air Force. It's hundreds and hundreds of pilots, you know, advanced aircraft. Of course, the F-16's are, to be honest, I mean, they're quite old to go back to the 1970s, and yes, they've been refurbished, but they're not even by American admissions up to the level of the, you know, the advanced Russian fighter jets that they would be up against. But, you know, we've had articles that have appeared about shell production in the US and Europe that is far below target and, you know, barely shifting upwards. We've had articles, again, appearing that Patriot missile production is basically plateaued, that they've hardly managed to increase it to any significant degree. Germany's cutting back on arms deliveries to Ukraine. Britain has given up effectively making arms deliveries to Ukraine, and there is a, there is a manpower crisis. Now, the Ukraine has been undertaking a mobilization over the last few months. We can hear huge amounts about that. There's been all of these pictures of men being seized on the streets and things of that kind, but there was a report yesterday at, well, there's been a number of reports over the last few days, one from Estonia, which said that Ukraine, all it is doing with this mobilization is trying to plug the holes in the Ukrainian units to try and reduce, you know, plug the holes that have been inflicted by the Russians through all their various losses. There's not enough men being provided by this mobilization to create reserve brigades. It says Ukraine is almost out of reserves, and then there was another report yesterday. We said that despite the mobilization, the great majority of Ukrainian soldiers are still the same soldiers that were conscripted or joined up in the army back in February and March 2022, that in fact, mobilization is producing relatively few extra men to fight in the war. So given all that, it is impossible to see what the pathway to survival is, let alone victory. I think this is something, again, which many people in the West are in complete denial about. They're not looking at the situation as it really is. They want to still believe that there's some kind of stalemate that there is still time to turn the situation around in some way, or at least wait, you know, it'll take a couple of months or even years before the collapse comes. And they're not recognizing how bad the situation on the front lines has now become Ukrainian troops retreating without against orders, which is what seems to have happened in progress. Ukrainian troops giving up 45 positions at incredible speed, in places like Toresk, towns like Pop Krosk becoming threatened and key supply lines about to be cut. And the veteran, mobile motivated soldiers becoming fewer and fewer in number and finding it more and more difficult to hold the line with and being replaced where they have to be replaced by soldiers who are far less motivated and are not prepared to fight in the way that the older soldiers were. It's too painful for them, for the collective ones, to realize what's happening. Agreed. Okay. Any other final thoughts? I mean, I think that on the one hand, I mean, the West is in denial about this. I think much of the rest of the world, you know, the major powers, China, India, Brazil, they can see the direction of events. And they've been making a big effort over the last couple of days to get the Ukrainians to see sense. So Orban went to Kiev. He got the Raspberry from Zelensky and the only result of that was that he got oil supplies from Russia cut off, which is a bit, I mean, petulant and childish and stupid, but there it is. And the Ukrainians sent their foreign minister, Kuleba, to China, it's taken some time for a genuine sense to come out of what happened over the course of that visit. But it's clear that Kuleba came with no new ideas still insisting that Ukraine must be given back all its territories. Apparently the Chinese are furious about this and the Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi had apparently a very angry meeting with Tony Blinken. And if you read the Chinese read out carefully, it looks to me as if Wang Yi basically blamed the Americans for this Ukrainian peak-headedness. Modi is now trying, just the next person is going to try to get the Ukrainians to be a little more realistic and a bit more rational. I think he's going to come away. Everybody's frustrated and disappointed as any everybody else and in the West, well, the Biden administration is not going to shift policy nor of the Europeans, it seems. We're heading towards a smash. It's now, I think, almost, almost hard-wired. I don't think there's anything that's going to stop him. Yeah, well, or Ban, China, Hungary, China, India, they made one last effort. It's not going to help and Ukraine is just trying to buy time. The Alatsky regime is just trying to buy time to figure out a way to exit this thing in one piece. Yeah. Well, Al-Amrif knows it, Patricia knows it, everyone knows it that they're just trying to buy time. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think they think that they can get the Chinese and the Indians and all of the others to sort of... the Chinese and the Indians and the Hungarians and the Brazilians and all of these are getting more and more angry with the Ukrainians and the Ukrainians, of course, simply will not accept this. So as I said, we're heading for a smash and I think that there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do that can change it. As you rightly said, this is the last sustained serious attempt to try to stop this, to try to help the Ukrainians out of this disastrous situation that they find themselves in. But it's achieved nothing because the Ukrainians don't want to talk. I mean, it's as simple as that. I think they would psychologically, it is easier for them to lose than to negotiate. And that's the situation that we're in. All right. We will end the video there at the demand.lockers.com. We're on Rumble Odyssey, Bitchewed Telegram, Rockfan, and TwitterX and go to the Duran Shop. Pick up some limited edition merch. The link is in the description box down below. Take care. [MUSIC] (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]